The Woes of A Hero: Impulse
by inkstrain
Summary: Although he was a hero in all forms, he was still just a human boy. Chloe helps Bart deal with a mission gone wrong. Rated T just to be sure.


**Author's Note:** Very general. Also very corny in my opinion, not to mention rushed, and yeah. Anyway, enjoy the read.

_[ EDIT - 06/09/10 ] _Modified the title. I was thinking of making one for each of the JL members minus Clark, but before you start bashing me for ignoring the farm boy let me explain: I just think there are so many Clark-centered stories out there already, so it's for the other guys to be on the limelight. Will be up soon, if I ever get the time and yeah.

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**The Woes of a Hero: Impulse  
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The world was a melting haze of different colors and distorted shapes. When he ran like this, faster than lightning and Clark Kent himself, everything became vague and took an indistinct, fluid-like form; an incomprehensible smudge in his fast-paced life that knew no sense of time and place, that surpassed the quick ticking of seconds, that brought his two feet running on vast oceans and among different continents in just a furious flash of red and yellow.

It felt good, leaving the world behind the way he did every time he ran. He liked running – he wasn't one to stay put and become idle, no way. He always had to be on the go because he acquired a sense of peace in exhilaration and rapidity, speeding ahead of everyone and everything unnoticed.

But lately, running had transitioned from good fun and want to a necessity, more than anything else. More than just a source of calm, it had become his means of getting away. Escape was, after all, very rare when you and your friends had an oblivious planet to save on almost a daily basis, and he took every chance he had to flee, especially when things went awry and he felt useless. Defeated and feeling utterly beaten by the bad that always seemed to conquer the good, he had finally come to a breaking point and fled, like the coward he never thought he would become.

It was the last mission that had finally taken its toll on him but no, the toll wasn't physical or mental in any way. If anything, he was actually quite fit in both aspects. It was his emotional state that had been horribly injured, leaving him swimming in a cesspool of his own mucky guilt. He could have done something. He should have acted faster, should have checked and rechecked all the laboratories until he found her. But he didn't and he couldn't bear the disappointment that clawed at his guts, begging to crawl out of his very skin to devour him inside and out.

But running like this, and he didn't have to think. Nothing mattered, time didn't even exist while his feet moved and ached with overuse. Heart beating erratically in his chest, he was thirsty and hungry but no, he wouldn't stop, couldn't, not if pausing just one second would mean being plagued by the events of that failed mission.

_The little girl in Impulse's arms was barely alive, but her heart was beating and that was all that was needed from Boy Scout before this kid was moved to safety. One of the mission's more important objectives was to get the kids imprisoned in this particular 33.1 facility out alive before they destroyed it, so if this girl was a corpse then it would betray their purpose. They, of course, didn't want to leave the dead behind, but then their priority were those still among the living._

"_Impulse, confirm you have prisoner from cell B11,"_

_From the com attached to his ear, Watchtower's voice came out business-like and a little crackly, if not a little too loud for his taste. But it wasn't the best time to complain about that. "Confirmed, I have the prisoner from B11. Boy Scout detected weak heartbeat, but otherwise prisoner looks like she's going to be okay." He replied, walking out of the room in just half a heartbeat before he was at their meeting place to find Green Arrow and Cyborg already waiting. Far off, Aquaman was headed toward them, carrying a limp form in his arms._

_Adjusting the little girl in his arms so she would at least be a little more comfortable, Impulse spoke to his com. "Prisoner from B11 safe, I'm back at the rendezvous point Watchtower." He said, nodding at Green Arrow who pressed a button on his own com before speaking._

"_Watchtower, this is Arrow. We're almost complete, we can see Aquaman heading back. Boy Scout's missing, what's his current location?"_

_They could all hear the Watchtower's background – clacking of keyboards, almost shotgun-like although a little more hushed, accompanied by at least a thousand various beeping sounds. "Getting the rest of the prisoners out, Boy Scout confirmed that all those who are left are…" he, and no doubt the rest of the team heard her swallow loudly. "Are dead. He's to and fro, in and out the building but he's almost finished moving all of them away from the building."_

_There was a full minute of tense silence among the members of the team, as well as all of them and Watchtower. It was broken only when Aquaman finally reached them, looking grim with eyes devoid of its usual sparkle. He nodded at each of them before speaking to his com. "Aquaman at the rendezvous point, I have prisoner from H05." He looked like he had more to say but he hesitated, before continuing anyway. "He was the only kid alive." His statement seemed only to thicken the atmosphere around them._

_And that was when she spoke, almost at the same time Boy Scout appeared among them. He seemed surprised at the sudden exclamation himself, having just arrived._

"_My sister!"_

_Impulse nearly had a heart attack as the girl in his arms jerked awake, two words spilling out of her mouth. Her tone was scared, and she visibly shook, looking up at him with wide eyes the size of satellite dishes. Surprised, he looked up at his team mates, and then Watchtower's voice was persistent on their ears before any of them could speak._

"_This is Watchtower, did I just hear someone else in the background?"_

_Being the leader, Arrow was quick to respond. "This is Arrow, yes Watchtower one of the prisoners is awake and," he glanced from nothing to the kid in Impulse's arms to Boy Scout who looked off the loop. "Looking for her sister. Boy Scout has just arrived, confirm we have everybody out?"_

_Boy Scout gave a nod. "Everyone's out. Aside from the kids we got they're…" he trailed off, looking at the little girl whose eyes were trained on what he was going to say. He didn't continue the rest of the sentence, but everyone knew what he was going to say. _

"_Heat source check?" Green Arrow asked, double checking, and Watchtower answered negative. There were no more heat signatures in the area. With a confirmation from Arrow, Watchtower then activated the bombs planted strategically on the facility and she was counting down the seconds, the place about to be reduced to a burning pile of useless debris. But she heard this, and the little girl went near hysterical._

"_Not dead! My sister's alive, we were trying to escape before the alarms!" she screamed, writing in Impulse's arms as if trying to get off. She was no more than eight or nine, pretty small for her age, but her eyes spoke volumes – that she'd been through so much in this facility that focused solely on experimenting on meteor-infected children. _

_Cyborg stepped forward to try and pacify the little girl, but she wouldn't calm down and she was hitting Impulse everywhere: on the face, neck, shoulders, chest. "Calm down, calm down. Your sister should be –" Empty words, but that was all they had at the moment. With much more prisoners dead than alive, none of them knew if this little girl's sister was among those who survived but they had to hope. _

_She cut Cyborg off long before he finished his sentence, and Impulse could barely hear how many seconds there was left before the explosion because she was screaming. "I can hear her! She's inside! She's hiding in one of the labs! We're twins, she looks like me and she can be invisible so you mustn't have seen her! She disappears everywhere when she's invisible! The scientists couldn't even see her in their computers! I can hear her in my head, she's alive!"_

_Her words froze Green Arrow, and through their coms they heard a spoken curse – Watchtower rarely cussed but it looked like the moment called for it because everyone's gazes met simultaneously as she confirmed the worst._

"_We have twenty seconds before detonation. I can't stop the countdown at this point."_

_And without thinking Impulse had pushed the girl in his arms upon Cyborg's own and was dashing back toward the facility in a blur of color all in less than half a second, speaking to his com as he went to the laboratories and circled everywhere, pausing here and there to look under operating tables and inside metal cabinets._

"_Watchtower, Impulse in one of the labs, can we check for heat signatures again?" There was a lot of clacking and a more persistent beeping sound that was not there earlier, but he couldn't be distracted. "No, I'm not picking anything up. There's nothing, I can't see a thing!"_

_Impulse gritted his teeth, shouting now but at the room he was in. "Is anyone here? We have to get you out!" there was no response, and he moved on to the next lab, shouting the same thing. It didn't help that there were more than a dozen laboratories here, and he almost didn't want to know how much time he had left before the place became a furnace but had to ask._

"_Watchtower, how many seconds?"_

_He was barely finished with his sentence but she was already answering back. "Less than fifteen Impulse, you have to get out of there."_

_Without replying, he still continued, moving from one laboratory to the next, not knowing how much time he spent stopping to scream at a little girl he couldn't see, to no avail. There was nobody there either, or anywhere for that matter. _

"_Eight seconds Impulse. Boy Scout what are you doing!"_

_There was another blur a little slower than him, and Impulse realized what Watchtower meant with what she said. At least now there were two of them, but despite the fact, they had no more time. They…_

_This time it was Green Arrow, worried and angry at the same time, who spoke to them through their coms. "Three seconds, get out of there you two!"_

_And the last thing that Impulse heard was the scream of a little girl while being shielded by Boy Scout's arms, the world turning into a burning sea of flames and smoke._

"_Impulse, this is Watchtower."_

He flinched but didn't stop running, not knowing what part of the globe he was in anymore as he pushed his legs and his body to nonexistent limits. Maybe it was his devastation or just pure adrenaline that kept him on his toes, but he wasn't tired. Or maybe he was… was he hearing things now?

"_Impulse this is Watchtower. Respond." _There was a pregnant pause, and he was still doubtful if he was indeed hearing things or not when the voice spoke again.

"_Please say something."_

He smashed down the sudden emotion that gripped him at the pleading tone coming from the voice on his earpiece, his heart constricting painfully in his chest. Running 24 hours nonstop, and he had forgotten to turn his com off or throw it away? He thought he wasn't even wearing it anymore or it had been removed during the course of his mad dash around the globe, but then if her voice wasn't a product of his growing insanity, he wouldn't imagine where else it could come from.

His breathing ragged without his noticing, still he ran, refusing to speak and to feel and to think.

"_It wasn't your fault."_

At this point, his eyesight began blurring, but this was different, this wasn't because of how fast he was anymore, and a strangled sound came out from his chest. There was a tremor in his knees that he had just felt then, and any moment he knew he was going to come crashing down both literally and no, in a shower of embarrassing tears.

At the moment he was still running though, with the little strength he had but it felt like his feet were taking him somewhere this time, not just everywhere. And then he spoke, voice barely understandable because he was choking on tears that were trying not to spill down his cheeks as he gasped for his quickly shortening breath.

"I could have done something." Suddenly amidst the blur and haze of speed things began to look familiar.

"_So you did."_ But he shook his head from side to side furiously that it hurt, but not more than the ache in his chest that seemed to be cutting his insides into an indiscernible bloody mess. "No, no, it wasn't enough, it just wasn't!"

There was a long pause, and then he thought he had stopped, finally collapsed but no – everything was still vague around the edges, like looking through frosted glass.

"The mere fact that you tried was enough Bart."His vision swam, and Bart Allen only realized then that his body had finally betrayed his resolve to never stop running because he was on the floor, in her arms, surrounded by computers and dread and the reason why they were still doing this. His vision went on and off, but she was there and she was crying and holding him, cradling his face on her small hands as she leaned forward, stopping the entire world and time itself so that everything else ceased to exist.

When Chloe Sullivan pulled away from a reassuring, loving kiss, Bart had stopped muttering senseless things, so she continued speaking, stroking his hair, calming his broken heart as he sobbed. "You did so much for her already, but the world isn't fair Bart – the point is you tried, and that _is _enough."

He shook his head, tears not wanting to stop now, devastation and exhaustion clouding his eyesight as his brain played on the borders of consciousness and sleep. But Chloe was shushing him, smiling through her own glassy eyes, lips gentle on his temple. It stayed there for a long while, even as she talked on.

"And we have to move on, Bart because we need to fight this fight over and over again, until we get to our goal, no matter how many road blocks and deaths we encounter along the way. The league needs you. Little girls like her need you." He shook then, body trembling and shivering, and she embraced him tighter to her.

"I need you."

Bart's lower lip quivered as she looked at a blurred version of Chloe. He wanted so much to cry, but sleep was tugging at him everywhere and he was losing consciousness. Maybe he would never wake up after this. A part of him didn't want to. But he had to. Chloe needed him. The league needed him. The world needed him.

"You're going to keep doing great things because that's what you're meant to do with the rest of the team. You can't give up."

Bart wanted to say more, to disagree and agree but already, he was falling asleep, face tear-stained, muscles throbbing painfully along with his heart. _Can't give up… _So he would stand back up tomorrow, refreshed and ready to fight again, and he was going to try harder because even if they didn't know it, people needed his help.

And he wasn't going to let them down.

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**A/N: **Wow, that was really… corny. Please say so when you review thanks.


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